Empusium, The: Health Resort Horror Story, A

In September 1913, a young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone - or something - seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world. Little does the newcomer realize, as he tries to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target. A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.

Review:

'Tokarczuk's fiction is built on filtering fragments of the past - people, stories, myths, orthodoxies - through a contemporary lens.... The Empusium is much less a debate of ideas than a study of our perception and the limits of sensory experience. Reality, or rather its elusiveness, preoccupies much of Tokarczuk's work, which frequently blends genres as a way to get closer to, if not at, what's true.... Grotesque sexism aside, there is spectacular humour to these scenes as the grandeur of their self-image is so elegantly undermined by the narrator's description of them.... This too is a novel that in Tokarczuk's dexterous hands transcends its own limits, further cementing the Nobel laureate as one of the most original storytellers of our age.'
- Matthew Janney, Financial Times

'Despite the large (if mischievous) debt to The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk makes this novel all her own with her idiosyncratic blend of registers and genres. She is both a collagist and a doodler, a freewheeling improvisator taking her narrative line for a gloriously erratic walk.... In Lloyd-Jones's poised translation, Tokarczuk's puckishness gleams brightly. The best passages in this new novel are weird, lyrical rhapsodies describing the natural world through the all-seeing eyes of those mysteriously plural narrators.... Happily, all the various unlikely strands come together in the closing chapters. The eerily majestic finale is haunting, cathartic and gleeful - a zany confection that could only have come from this unpredictable, unique writer.'
- Claire Lowdon, Times Literary Supplement

'Deft and disturbing.... In Antonia Lloyd-Jones's crisp translation, Tokarczuk tells a folk horror story with a deceptively light and knowing tone ... elegant and genuinely unsettling.'
- Hari Kunzru, New York Times

'The book challenges you to think while still being slyly funny ... [and] there's also a compelling plot to pull us along.... There are three plot-twisting surprises, one that I guessed early on, one I was wrong about and one that floored me. Tokarczuk is a writer of definite views, many of which I disagree with, but this is clever, intelligent stuff, touched with genius.'
- David Mills, The Times

'The Nobel Prize-winning novelist is exceptionally adept at blending the high-minded sanctimoniousness of the sanatorium with the ever-present threat and legacy of violence.... Tokarczuk's outstanding novel is a striking reaffirmation of literature's genius for nuance in a world darkened by murderous polarities.'
- Michael Cronin, Irish Times

'The tension builds to a wild night of collective madness, a drunken witches' sabbath. And death will come for someone. There's an almost Borgesian quality to the resolution. But remember, this is Tokarczuk. Nothing is ever quite as it seems.'
- Lee Langley, Spectator

'It's an odd, fascinating book - a blackly serious joke - from an author of great daring and intelligence.... The writing, in a cultivated translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, shares the easygoing gait and twinkling irony of Mann's novel.... It makes for absorbing if often mystifying reading, but what stands out most is the philosophical conflict it stages between rationality and folk belief.'
- Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

'From mystery drinks and deaths to commentary upon religion and gender, this book is the literary horror story that eagerly awaits your autumn reading list.... A magnificently haunting portrayal of health, death, and all that comes in between, The Empusium is one of Tokarczuk's best works to date.'
- Madeline Schultz, Chicago Review of Books

'The Nobel Laureate's bloody and moody fairy tale will blow your mind.... Tokarczuk keeps the suspense at a low boil throughout, balancing moments of terror and revulsion.... Until the horror and the beauty can no longer be contained, that is, and erupt into the novel's utterly sublime conclusion. As ever, Tokarczuk's prose - and Antonia Lloyd-Jones' glorious translation thereof from the Polish - will knock the wind out of you.'
- Chelsea Davis, San Francisco Chronicle

'Tokarczuk has a lot of fun with her novel's pulpy gothic trappings, but ... there's also a much more serious reckoning going on with ideas of gender and twentieth century political thought. A gleefully mischievous feminist riposte to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.'
- Claire Allfree, Daily Mail

'Olga Tokarczuk is inspired by maps and a perspective from above, which tends to make her microcosmos a mirror of macrocosmos. She constructs her novels in a tension between cultural opposites: nature versus culture, reason versus madness, male versus female, home versus alienation.'
- 2018 Nobel Committee for Literature

'A magnificent writer.'
- Svetlana Alexievich, 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate

'A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.'
- Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News

'One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.'
- The Economist

'Tokarczuk's latest work reckons with some of the major intellectual questions of the 20th century while simultaneously spinning a mysterious - and spooky - web of intrigue and suspense. A crucial addition to Tokarczuk's oeuvre.'
- Kirkus, starred review

'Olga Tokarczuk's The Empusium is a richly entertaining, captivating and thought-provoking novel. Despite its acute engagement with The Magic Mountain it's more Hoffmann than Mann, which works in its favour.'
- David Hayden, author of Darker With the Lights On

'[A] visionary novel ... Tokarczuk is wrestling with the biggest philosophical themes: the purpose of life on earth, the nature of religion, the possibility of redemption, the fraught and terrible history of eastern European Jewry. With its formidable insistence on rendering an alien world with as much detail as possible, the novel reminded me at times of Paradise Lost. The vividness with which it's done is amazing. At a micro-level, she sees things with a poetic freshness.... The Books of Jacob, which is so demanding and yet has so much to say about the issues that rack our times, will be a landmark in the life of any reader with the appetite to tackle it.'
- Marcel Theroux, Guardian (praise for The Books of Jacob)

'The Books of Jacob is a spellbinding epic, one of the great literary achievements of the decade: a poetically brimful recreation of the world of a Jewish false messiah in 18th-century Poland, but beyond as well to mystically drawn priests and errant aristocrats. Charged with a sensuous immediacy it's the kind of hypnotic novel you not so much read as dwell in, and which then, magically, comes to dwell in you.'
- Simon Schama, Financial Times (praise for The Books of Jacob)

'Drive Your Plow is exhilarating in a way that feels fierce and private, almost inarticulable; it's one of the most existentially refreshing novels I've read in a long time.'
- Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker (praise for Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead)

'Tokarczuk's novels, poems and short stories consistently open up unpredictable wonders and astonishments, and there isn't a genre that she can't subvert. ... Antonia Lloyd-Jones pulls off a flawless, intimate translation, even tackling the technically dazzling feat of presenting Blake's poems as translations from English into Polish, back into English. ... [Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead] will make you want to read everything that Tokarczuk has written.'
- Financial Times (praise for Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead)

'Flights works like a dream does: with fragmentary trails that add up to a delightful reimagining of the novel itself.'
- Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings (praise for Flights)

'It's a busy, beautiful vexation, this novel, a quiver full of fables of pilgrims and pilgrimages, and the reasons - the hidden, the brave, the foolhardy - we venture forth into the world.... The book is transhistorical, transnational; it leaps back and forth through time, across fiction and fact. Interspersed with the narrator's journey is a constellation of discrete stories that share rhyming motifs and certain turns of phrase.... In Jennifer Croft's assured translation, each self-enclosed account is tightly conceived and elegantly modulated, the language balletic, unforced.'
- Parul Sehgal, New York Times (praise for Flights)

Author Biography:

Olga Tokarczuk is the author of nine novels, three short story collections and has been translated into more than fifty languages. Her novel Flights won the 2018 International Booker Prize, in Jennifer Croft's translation. She is the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Empusium is her fourth novel to appear in English with Fitzcarraldo Editions.